Another Thing That Apple Needs To Fix In iOS 6 Maps: Overlapping Streets

By now you’ve heard about the many problems with Apple’s new Maps app in iOS 6. It can be unreliable and just flat out wrong pretty often, and many well-known locations are either missing or severely misplaced. Maps will get better over time, but Apple has a lot of work to do.

David Bonnefoy upgraded to iOS 6 on his iPhone and noticed many of the same issues that have been reported on for weeks. There were also several points of interest that were misplaced due to overlapping streets.

I realized that many are located as if the streets were much wider than they really are, to the point they sometime overlap with the next parallel street. So the points of interest are pushed away from the streets into the buildings, and sometimes they are closer to the next street – which is very confusing.

The above screenshot is a part of Paris, and Bonnefoy has drawn attention to the many inconsistencies.

In the figure, the businesses on ‘Rue d’Enghien’ are located as if the street was extended to the pink lines and those on ‘Rue de l’Echiquier’ as if that second street was extended to the orange lines. The businesses on the map are moved as shown by the arrows, and thus the places on those two streets are mixed up.

Bonnefoy is right, it is kind of scary that these kinds of mapping errors are present in a city like Paris. Hopefully we’ll see dramatic improvements soon. In the meantime, you can report Maps problems to Apple inside the app.